Even though I almost live around the corner from Brussels, this year was the first time I went to the FOSDEM conference. I have to say that it was an impressive experience. Two days packed with hundreds of interesting talks about all things open source and thousands of attendees make this conference without doubt to an extremely interesting event. Add to this that it completely free and organized by a crew of motivated volunteers and you'll understand that it is truly exceptional.

Red Hat and JBoss had quite a good presence at the conference with more than 30(!) talks. In particular there was the JBoss.org devroom organized by Frédéric Hornain. The room had capacity of about 70 people and it was quite crowded at times.

Marek Goldman had the honour of kicking off the devroom with his talk about Boxgrinder. After that Geoffrey Desmet awed his audience talking about Drools Planner. Unfortunately the Openshift talk had to be canceled as the presenter didn't make it to the conference. Carlo de Wolf's talk about building AS7 for Fedora had without doubt some of the most passionate discussions. After Carlo, it was my turn to take the stage for my talk about JBoss Forge and Arquillian. Manik Surtani was up after me presenting on Infinispan. Right before Marco Rietveld and Geoffrey Desmet ended the day with a talk about Guvnor and jBPM, Heiko Rupp had a presentation on the RHQ project. All in all I thought this devroom was a big success and should if possible be repeated next year.

In my presentation I have explained how JBoss Forge and Arquillian are invaluable tools to help build Java EE 6 applications. I also have used the work of Adam Warski to show how easily a simple Forge plugin can be created for the Envers framework. The presentation consisted of three long demo parts with live coding and a slideshow that tied it all together. Unfortunately I forgot to hit the record button so I have no screencast available of the talk at this moment. As a console prize, you can take a look at the slides below though.